My spelling and grammar are atrocious, not by a little bit by a long bit! I always thought that my grammar was okay. I knew it wasn’t stellar but never realized how bad it was. I should have paid more attention in school, but I was too busy with sport and other what seemed at that time important things.

Since I started writing a blog post a day my poor grammar has become more evident. I have a coach helping me on my journey. Bless him for articulating in such a pleasant manner that my grammar is poor. If the roles were reversed I am not sure if I would be as polite as he has been about my writing.

So how does a person go about fixing or working on their spelling and grammar? Well, I think it’s the same as coding. The more you read and write the better you get. There are also obviously much quicker fixes like word processors that will quickly give you feedback about your spelling and grammar.

I found Grammarly, which is one such tool. It will give you quick feedback on grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. The Grammarly website states

Grammarly is an automated proofreader and your personal grammar coach
Correct up to 10 times more mistakes than popular word processors.

I signed up for Grammarly and have slowing been making my way through my previous posts and fixing them up. So far it has been very good and whilst I don’t always score a 100% rating, the grammar in my blog posts seem to be much better.

I do want to make it clear that this is just a crutch; I should be reading and writing a lot more so that I can stop making these grammatical errors that would shock a fifth grader.

So I know this was a non-technical post but I am sure if you use something like Grammarly or similar your readers will be much happier reading what you have to say, so here is to getting a “Well that was profound” reaction instead of a WTF after each sentence.

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My name is Deon Heyns and I am a developer learning things and documenting them in realtime. Python, Ruby, Scala, .NET, and Groovy are all languages I have written code in. I appeared in the New York Post once. I host my code up at GitHub and Bitbucket so have a look at my code, fork it and send those pull requests.